Smile for the Cameras
by Broken Antler in Winter
Summary: Avengers/Hunger Games Fusion. Natasha is a District One victor, and she's been waiting for this moment her entire life, in general. T for mentions of rape.


It's the way all District One girls go and it's fucked up, broken to the core, disgusting, and so fucking human of them to be turning prisoners into playthings, but Natasha is nothing if not a survivor. In Panem it means laughing and smiling when you want to scream. Be who they want you to be and let who you are disappear.

The way things work is that Natasha's parents die of some plague that spreads across the District One masses that work at the factories and mines instead of the shops when she's four and still naive enough to think they'll come back. Soon another mouth to feed and even one that's blood isn't worth as much to Isabella Romanova as a small handful of tens and twenties to give away a pretty redheaded little girl to be trained like a lamb for slaughter.

(she thinks it may be the best 'fuck you' she can give to live when she was trained to die, but then she gets nightmares of the smell of blood, of sweating hands trailing down her back, of dying and screaming and childhoods denied, and she thinks that maybe she should've died in the arena.)

Whatever way, she's always playing the Capitol's game.

The training centre is sterile and white and one of the advertised glamour of District One that's made to win the favour of the Capitol. It's only room after room of children who think they want to kill children. She thinks that she might just be the youngest killer in the world.

Natasha's the best of the best and the trainers smile and say that someday the world will know, and Natasha has learned just to ask when.

(the thing is, there's this time when they ask her to kill the pet they gave her and she wondered for a moment what would happen if she told the trainers to go to hell and she smiled and slit its throat instead and the gods laughed.)

For her trainers, she is deadly, precise, and perfect.

When she's fourteen, Natasha grows enough that she's also beautiful. Of course, they make her volunteer that year. It should be easy, right? Kill, kill, kill twenty-three other children and she can finally be left with peace and quiet and maybe she'll get a cat that she doesn't have to slaughter eventually.

(and honestly, career tributes, so many of them, are _smarter _than people think, when they're mentored sometimes by Muslin and Cashmere and Gloss and Silk and they're all the ones that know that it comes with a _price_.)

They feed the Capitol a story. Natasha wears a black lace tutu with a train to her calves, and a red and black leotard with a single ruby in the center. By District One standards, it's actually tasteful, even if Natasha hates dresses, even if she used to love the, for no reason other than she can't _fight _in them. Natasha charms at the interview and tells Caesar Flickerman that she wanted to be a ballerina, once, but the glory and delight of the Capitol entranced her, and she grabbed the opportunity to go to the Capitol, to either live the rest of her life with the beautiful people of the Capitol, or die in their arms.

She doesn't want to die.

It is easy. Natasha kills the career pack at the cornucopia, except for the District Four boy who runs away bleeding with first-aid in hand but nothing else. The rest she hunts down with chilling precision, her blood-red hair down to her neck and tangled with branches and leaves. After each kill, there's are silver wings drifting from the sky and landing at her feet, food and drink so she never goes hungry. And soon enough, it's nothing but a _five, four, three, two, one. _

(and then there were none alive to tell the tale and she sure as hell won't.)

The blood on her black-gloved hands will never wash off. Eventually she decides to stop trying. Natasha Romanova is Victor of the 70th Annual Hunger Games, lifted out of the arena like a fallen angel turned goddess, beautiful bringer of death, not a single mark on her.

(well that's only after the remake, when that one scar from the District 12 boy who stuck the knife through her waist is washed off just like they wash off the blood from her kill.)

Eventually, she decides it's not so bad. She's fourteen, young for a victor, and she'll have enough money never to starve again. She'll live alone, probably, become some old crazy cat lady when the dogs bring too many old memories. She'll buy a house in the outskirts of the city, and there'll be careers visiting to ask her to recount those stories, but she'll shake her head and tell them to go home, stay with their parents, pretend the Reaping never happens.

She'll grow old with nightmares and terrors and times when she wishes she were dead, but her survival instinct will win out. It doesn't matter as long as they leave her alone.

(so, of course, they don't.)

Natasha is sold first time during her victory tour.

Again.

Again.

(again.)

They never told her, never warned her, but she can't be surprised. She's a born and bred District One city rat, seen the things that happen in the seedier parts of the city, and knows that the Capitol can always, _always, _stoop lower than you thought. Yes, she's fucked. Yes, she'll never have her freedom, because for some reason she still cares about other humans. Yes, she has too many things left to lose. But Natasha's nothing if not a survivor, so while Tony Stark gets hammered in the corner and invents little weapons (they all know what for) for his electrical district, while Bruce Banner tries to help his tributes but can't achieve anything except _rage _when he knows it's all hopeless, while Thor Odinson screams of the injustice at night when no one can hear, while Clint, maybe the only one who understands how it is, pines for home and seeds rebellion, Natasha smiles.

She smiles and collects her little secrets. They fill up in her mind and eventually she can whisper in an ear something you'll never have heard before.

(oh yes, she knows all your secrets, President Alexander Pierce, she knows all your secrets of poison and treachery and rise to the top.)

The night that Steve Rogers, the eighteen year-old boy who gave his enemies a good burial and oh-so silently rebelled against the Capitol and made a such a close friend out of a _career _who died for him, is airlifted out of the arena with all of his defiance, Natasha and the rest stand together. _  
><em>

Their smiles are bitter and their eyes are filled with the glitter of rebellion.

(she's been waiting for this her entire life.)


End file.
